Hey look, another draft video with an extremely old set! If you’ve watched these before, you know the story. Mike had more money than he had sense, and ended up buying unopened boxes of some seriously old Magic sets. What do you do with unopened boxes of seriously old Magic sets? Why, you stream two-man Winchester Drafts of them! Don’t let’s be silly!
But this time, we’re drafting the dreaded Fallen Empires. The first tribal set! Of course, half of those tribes are almost extinct nowadays, but we won’t hold it against them. Homarids just needed to die, after all. Storyline-wise, this set was all about each color handling its own internal conflict, rather than pitting the colors against each other. There were two warring factions in each color, giving the set a bizarre disconnected feel (in my opinion, anyway).
Now for some tidbits of interest. Fallen Empires was MASSIVELY overprinted. Seriously, these things were everywhere. And they still are! It’s a good thing they didn’t come with gum like old baseball cards, or else there would have a serious chance of having to deal with mutated oozes. It was also the last time the tilted T was used to indicate tapping (that nifty little curved arrow thing showed up in the next set). And if you look very carefully at the mana symbols on these cards compared to sets that came after, you’ll see that this is the last set with the “original” ones. It’s easiest to tell on the white symbol.
As you may have heard, a while back Mike made a series of spectacularly bad eBay decisions and ended up with some unopened boxes of some old sets. You saw the first of these in our Homelands Winchester, which was actually a lot of fun and I highly recommend that you go watch it. If you have no experience with the old sets, it’s cool to check out how far things have come. And if you have played with them, it’s a nice bit of nostalgia.
But we had so much fun with Homelands that we decided to give it another go. This time, Mike brought over his box of Mirage! Ah yes, Mirage. For the record, I hate hate HATE Femeref Healers. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Mirage brought us bizarre new things like phasing and flanking, but let’s not hate on it too much for those. Flanking was actually pretty cool. Mirage also gave us the very first appearance of charms! You know, cheap modal spells that have 3 useful-but-not-really-worth-a-card abilities on them. Charms have popped up 6 times now, but Mirage was the first.
Some time ago, Mike made a series of spectacularly bad eBay decisions and ended up with a few unopened boxes of some very old Magic sets. We’re talking Chronicles, Mirage, Fallen Empires, and Homelands. Yeah, I said Homelands. Poor Mike.
So of course we’re going to do something with them! Mike and I decided to stream a Winchester Draft, and we started with the Homelands box. We were convinced that it would be better than the Winchesters that were done with the Ice Age packs he had found somewhere or other. Ice Age was miserably short on creatures, and the drafts were pretty bad. Homelands has a reputation for being terrible, but we were convinced that it would be a decent Limited environment, if for no other reason than the high number of creatures.
Oh yeah, before you click you should know that we are not at our usual PG rating in this video. It was late on a Friday night and we were just having fun, so the filters came off. Also, these have not been edited in any way. You’ve been warned.